Life in the Oak Ridge Area Before 1942: Part 1

Life in the Oak Ridge Area before 1942
Presented by Lockheed Martin
Led by Mick Wiest
April 18, 1998
[Note: This was a video from the American Museum of Science and Energy. Presented at the Freels Bend Cabin Site, Mick Wiest with the Reservation Management Organization of Lockheed Martin Energy Systems Environmental Compliance Organization provides brief prehistoric and historic accounts of the area along with several long-time residents who give first-hand accounts of life before the Manhattan Project, on Saturday, April 18, 1998. This was one of six presentations that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the American Museum of Science and Energy co-sponsored.]
Mick Wiest: Welcome everyone to the Reservation, the DOE Oak Ridge Reservation. This is a history talk sponsored by DOE and Oak Ridge National Lab and the American Museum of Science and Energy. And if you haven’t had a chance to look at the display that they have on early Oak Ridge, I invite you to do so. They did an excellent job on that. I want to thank Mack Baker for his video work. He is with Lockheed Martin. My name is Mick Wiest, and I am with Lockheed Martin. I help with a group called the Reservation Management Organization and their job is to stay in compliance with the many federal state and local laws and governing what we do, the activities, new projects that come in, and also on-going activities. We try to stay in compliance with those regulations. One of my duties is looking at cultural resources and making sure that we comply with the National Historic Preservation Act. This resource that you are sitting here on, the Freels Cabin, is one that dates way back to before the Civil War. It’s an important one and we do a number of programs out here. One that is going on today with a group, Chris Light is having a group out here looking at nature, I believe it is. And there are programs scheduled throughout the year. We have other cultural resources on the reservation, the Bethel Valley Church nearby, we also have, oh, by the way, Bethel Valley Church will be having their homecoming tomorrow, and the George Jones Memorial Baptist Church, which is in the Wheat Community, they have their homecoming in October. Maybe Bonita Irwin can tell us a little bit more about that. And also this site being on the National Register of Historic Places is one of seven that DOE has. The other three are the checking stations, one on Oak Ridge Turnpike, one at Scarboro Road and Bear Creek Road, and the one on Bethel Valley Road. In a few minutes I will be introducing Mary Harris, the Anderson County Historian, and we are fortunate to have her come out and speak to us. And we also hope that some of you will share some of your experiences from those days, living in those communities that make up this area. There was Scarboro, Robertsville, there was the Wheat Community and the Gravel Hill Community, not too far from here.
One of the things that has impressed me the most is looking at an aerial photograph taken in 1942 of this area. It is quite different from aerial photos you will see today. There was very much cleared land, there was a lot of crop and pasture land out here, the ridge tops were mostly wooded, but it was surprising how much of a farming community this was. It is certainly turned back to forest now.
We’re standing on historic ground, one reason because of this cabin, it was here back before the Civil War and it is one of the best preserved cabins, it is the best one on the Oak Ridge Reservation, and certainly for many miles around. We have some of the descendants of the Freels family here today. This land was also historic because it was home to our Native Americans. Right here on Freels Bend, we have a few Indian mounds that have been surveyed by archeologists. They are significant and we know, artifacts have been found that go back several thousand years. In the last few hundred years, this was the home of the Cherokee, and they were an advanced tribe, most of them were farmers. They had their own written language and even their own national newspaper, but as we know, they were forced out of their land about 1838. That wasn’t far from the date that we think this cabin was built. We think about 1840 to 1850, this cabin was built.
The third reason that this area is historic is because of the Manhattan Project, and that project, a lot of people don’t realize that it was the largest, single industrial project in the history of the world. And for that reason alone, it is quite significant to remember what went on here. A lot has been said about Oak Ridge and the Manhattan Project, so we won’t get into that much today. What we want to do is talk about the days before 1942, and I want to mention that we have some evaluation forms. I’d like you to fill those out at the close of our talk. Like to hear what you have to say about it, also there is a small form if you have questions of me or comments on how DOE manages these cultural resources, we’d like to hear from you on that.
Right now I would like to introduce Mary Harris. She is the Anderson County historian. She has been very helpful in answering my questions as they come along. If you need to reach Mary she is, her office is at the Court House, Anderson County Court House. So, I would like to turn it over to Mary.
Mary Harris: Thank you, Mick. Appreciate the opportunity to get to come out here. This is the first time I have ever been to the cabin. And I am sure there are more of you all here that can tell me about the history than I can tell you. But being a native, my grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents were in Tennessee before Tennessee became a state. I qualify as being a first Tennessean. My ancestors were married in 1794. So, it makes me proud to think that I am a Tennessean.
First time I met Mick, I got involved with Anderson County cemeteries and doing so much genealogy and family research and what not, cemeteries fascinated me. And when I got into one, instead of just picking out my ancestors, I started recording all of the cemeteries. So, in Anderson County I recorded three hundred and ten cemeteries, in Anderson County. Over three hundred ten cemeteries, over twenty-seven thousand tombstone inscriptions. And the book does have all of the cemeteries that are in the restricted area of Anderson County. Our cemeteries are slowly being deteriorated. And there are some of them that I would just sit and would cry when I would go into some of them. I really got involved in doing genealogy and historical work. Let me put it this way; if you do genealogy, you have got to enjoy history, because it is history. This area like I said, goes back from my ancestors prior to statehood, and then when I got involved in helping other people, when I started with my own family. Of course our family was a generated family of this is your aunt, this is your great-aunt, these are your cousins, and we were a close knit family. Daddy was a coal miner and he left Tennessee and went to Texas. And I got borned in Texas. So the old saying is if you lose your ancestors go to Texas, you know. But then Daddy came back to Tennessee, came back home, and then he went into Kentucky. So I was raised and got my education in Kentucky. But every chance and opportunity that we got we’d go home, go home. Kentucky was not my home; it is still not my home. Tennessee was home. So, when I married a Kentuckian boy, and he went to work for Union Carbide, and every chance he had he’d say, “I’ve got to go home”, I’d say, “Well, I’m already home”. But as time grew, and I would be downtown or something, I’d wave at some body, he’d say, “Who’s that?”, I’d say, “That’s my cousin.” He would make the remark, “You’re related to everybody in Anderson County.” I said, “Campbell County and Roane County.” (Laughter) and he said, “Well, I didn’t have any.” And I said, “Oh, everyone has lots of ancestors.” So, I said, “We will find you some.” And low and behold, I started. His four-great grandfather got married in Blount County. So, I brought him back home and we have a complete cycle back once again.
It just enjoys my soul to think that when I help you and anyone else that I come in contact with, hey, I know that family and when I started working on the court records, preserving the court records, at the Court House, which was a voluntary job that I took on. Three years, I cleaned and salvaged and organized all the old court records. Some of them go back to early 1805, was some of the earliest ones I found. I got them cataloged, I got them indexed by surname. I had took them to Nashville, had them microfilmed and now they are at the archives in Nashville, we have a copy of the microfilm in the Clinton Library, the index is there. We are up through, the only county in the state of Tennessee that has all of their loose records microfilmed up through the confidentiality period. So, if you’re looking for anything, we can almost find it. But it thrills me to know that I can come in contact with you people and in doing my research, and cleaning the papers, I’d get tickled when I’d be reading some of the articles, the papers, I’d think, “Oh, I know where that person is buried”, because I had finished the cemetery book. And I get involved with these families as well as my own.
When Mick called me, the first time I met him, they had put an article in the plant paper and my nephew saw it and he called me and said, “Aunt Sue,” he said, “I think you need to get in touch with Mick Wiest. He’s found a cemetery”. So I called him and he said, “I don’t think it’s been recorded.” So he took my husband and I down, it’s in Roane county, but it had not been recorded. We went in and it was the Manley family. I did research on the family and at one time that was the main road that went into Roane County and they had an inn where they house people with the stage coach. So you can see how much history you can get by just going backwards. I know we live in a fast pace today, but when you get to talking, several of you today, and how close we are knitted. The lady that was right here, we were talking and she said, “Oh, Tiffany Harris.” That is my granddaughter and her granddaughter are roommates at UTC, Chattanooga. So, you see what a small world we really live in. But I just recently, at the end of December, coauthored our bicentennial history book of Anderson County. There are over 200 pictures that we acquired and published in this book. And in one of the pictures, I know the Jones family. There is the ferry there at Edgemoor, which would be in that direction I think, is that not right, Mick?
Mick Wiest: Yes.
Mary Harris: OK, they lived in that area. They were neighbors of the Freels. And so when I get to talking to these people, it’s amazing, how much we all are in a sense neighbors still yet. And I picked up out of my Goodspeed book, the particular one on this one was J.N. Freels. Said he was one of the prominent citizens of the North Civil District of Anderson County and was a merchant of Scarborotown and they didn’t separate Scarborotown, it was all one word, I was surprised by that. Says he was born June the first, 1840 in Anderson County and he was the son of William S. and Maria Tunnell-Freels. They were both natives of Anderson County. Of course, you know, the Tunnell family is going down the old highway, said that the father was born 1800 and he was the son of Isaac Freels and he was a farmer, died in 1886. The mother was born 1809 and the daughter of Jessie Tunnell. She died in 1851. Says he was reared on the farm and attended the schools of the neighborhood. He worked on the farm until the breaking out of the Civil War, in which he enlisted in February of 1862 in the Federal Army. And apparently his schooling paid off because he was in the quartermaster department as a clerk. In 1863, he was appointed a second lieutenant and in the Thirteenth Regiment of the Tennessee. He served as the rest of the war and mustered out from the service in Knoxville in 1865. He returned home in 1867 and began his merchandising at Scarborotown. He was commissioned post office of the town in 1876. He married July 1870, Julie Hoskins. And once again there is another family that we are all associated with. It says to the union there were seven children been born and to the subject the wife is a Methodist Episcopal Church. It is good to know that they put that down.
I’m a collector’s bug. I have a habit of anything that I can collect, I collect. I’m a pack rat in other words. I came across something at an estate sale. And books, maps, anything of history takes my eye first. And I came across this, A Historical View of Oak Ridge: The pre-Oak Ridge Community at Kathy’s Kitchen”. This is prior to when Oak Ridge was built. It just so happened that there is a picture of the Freels cabin in this little pamphlet. And then the William Freels Home, which is on Bethel Valley Road, Cure Home, it goes right into Scarboro, Bethel Church, and the Worthington home, which was right at the Elza Gate. There is also a little Worthington cemetery there which would be just around the bend, and of course Elza Gate and once again inside the store. This is the Robertsville School. And I know all of you have pictures and can reminisce and know more than I did.
I can remember my grandparents lived in the Campbell County area when TVA built Norris Dam. They had to sell out and move. They took their land. They moved to Dyllis Community. And then when Oak Ridge came along they had to move again. So I feel for them, but I am thankful that they were ready and willing to go along with progress. I can remember as a child when we came to see them that we, that was before the bypass was put in, we would have to come to the gate, and Daddy would have to get a guard, security guard to go with us, drive through the Oak Ridge area until we would get to the other side, to go and see my grandparents. I’m sure that some of you could tell me more than I know of this area, but I am thankful that I have the opportunity to meet all of you and put more insight on what our ancestors did to make what we are today.
I invite any and all of you if you want to do any family research, come and see me, I’ll do what I can. I have my own library at home that I do research, but as I am at the Court House from 8:30 to 4:30. I bring my lunch, so I don’t leave out. So if I can help anybody that is involved, I’d be more than glad and I do appreciate the opportunity, Mick, to come here today to see such a view. Could you imagine how Mr. Freels felt when he stood on this piece of land and said, “This is home”, and look out to see what he could see. It thrills me to know that I am a part of being a great Tennessean. Thank you. Yes ma’am.
Audience member 1 (white shirt, lady next to man in hat): A lot of cemeteries in this area, the writing on the tombstones are obscure. Were you able to find in cases like that who was buried there?
Mary Harris: What I did, I carried what we call carpenter chalk and a soft brush. I would take and brush the debris from it, and then take a piece of carpenters chalk and rub on it and the imprints of the writing, and then I would also take a piece of paper, a real thin piece of paper with a black pencil and I would trace the letters. One particular incident that I found that really fascinated me and took me a long time to decipher. Of course, Anderson County is the second county that I have recorded, cemeteries I have recorded. I recorded Marion County. This one particular tombstone that I was reading, started out was born so and so, this just doesn’t make any sense. So I copied each letter, each line on down to the very bottom and I thought, “Well, how in this world can I decipher this?” What they had done was they started writing this line, and then came back down this and then down this way until they got down to the very bottom. And I finally figured it out. There is so much on a tombstone that you wouldn’t believe how much information, you can get a death date then you can go and read deeds, you can read wills, you can read court records, where if there wasn’t a will probated, you can get the whole family history from some court records. One particular one that I had, sorry Mick, I get started, Mick, and I can’t stop.
Mick Wiest: That’s fine.
Mary Harris: There was one family of mine that I had pretty well documented. Everything that I knew and I thought that this is it. Until I started cleaning the court records. In 1843, this ancestor had died leaving no will, but he had 470 acres of land. So I thought well now there has to be a distribution some place. It just so happen that when the land had to be sold, we called a patrician suit, all the heirs had to sign their permission to sell the piece of property. Four of them went to Missouri and in these documents they had to give their depositions then they listed their children. Then I was able to go to Missouri and find all of their families even to descendants today. So you see you can, there are so many things of our history that has been preserved if we just look at it. and I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to serve as a historian, I love history, I love people, I love there, I love what they do, and many a time they kid me and say, when I get out into a cemetery, I say, “Well I take my lunch because I sit and eat with them.” The quietest place there is. The only thing there is that I ask sometimes that they talk to me. My husband always says, “What would you do if they did?” I said, “I’d run like crazy!” (Laughter) But it is a lot of fun. In doing the cemeteries I have met some of the nicest people of our counties. People say, “You don’t want to go into that section, you don’t want to go in that area.” It’s not so. If you go looking for trouble, you’re going to find it. My husband and I one day we hiked 15 miles up above Laurel Grove to find a cemetery. We found it, but it was neat, clean. And you would think no way would people come way up here to clean a little family plot. But it was. It just fascinates me to know. And this really sets my day off. I told Mick, I was trying to beg off because I had a trip planned this morning and he said, “No, I’ll move it up to 9:30 if you can come”. And I am so glad that you did, Mick. And I wouldn’t have missed it for nothing in this world. I can relate back to you Freels now. I say I’ve been there and that is something.
Nadine___: What about the cemetery at Scarboro where they don’t have any markers, how did you record who was buried there?
Mary Harris: Well if there was no marker I have no way of knowing other than if I can find a court record or I could find an old document that said so and so died and their buried at the Scarboro Cemetery.
Nadine___: Because when they clean that off they was just markers that they just mowed over and broken and put them over the fence.
Mary Harris: That’s right. They still done that. There was one up in part of the county that it wasn’t like that. But this person from out of state bought the property; they took and threw the stones in the river.
Nadine___: They threw them over the fence because I’ve been there when there was a pile here and a pile there on that side.
Mary Harris: But if they didn’t have a marker other than where I did that cemetery where Mick found. I did some research and I went back and it told…
Nadine___: So there is no way of having…
Mary Harris: A complete. No, no way, but it is interesting in taking a family in a community and start piecing them all together. Through census, through court records, through church records, you can eventually get a big part of them. Yeah, you sure can. Thank you. (Applause)
Mick Wiest: Mary was mentioning the cemeteries. We have got thirty-one on what is today’s Oak Ridge Reservation. It is about thirty-five thousand acres, but originally it was about fifty-nine thousand. There were about seventy cemeteries at that time. Some had to be moved. Many today are being cared for by the City of Oak Ridge, but DOE [ Department of Energy] maintains thirty-one of them. We do keep the areas mowed, we repair the fences and you are able to visit them. Some are in areas and you’ve got to call the lab shift superintendent, or the plant shift superintendent, but you can get in there to see them.
Mary Harris: You do better than TVA. TVA won’t keep theirs clean.
Mick Wiest: Well, thank you, Mary.
Barbara McCall-Ely: They do a beautiful job of taking care of the ones that we have. You call them and they take care of them.
Mary Harris: They do, they do. There was a little park down in Chattanooga. They had a TVA guard that lived there on a trailer, maintaining the park, and there was a little cemetery right in the park. They fenced it off and it had grown up. I ask him, “Why don’t you take care of it?” “That is not my plot.” So, I appreciate you.
Audience Member 4 (male black shirt far end of porch): Have you been able to identify any of the people in the slave cemetery, AEC number two, down across from K-25?
Mary Harris: No, your slave people. There are about three cemeteries that have got slaves in them. There is one in Lake City and there is one up on 61, going up toward Andersonville, and one outside, there’s two outside Lake City.
Lady in Green: There is one down here by K-25. The Gallahers.
Nadine___: There is one on Edgemoor Road too.
Don Watson: There on, down where the Gallaher Ferry was near K-25.
Audience member 4: Do you know any of the slaves that were buried there? I know they were Gallaher slaves.
Audience member 5: I have records where Freels, Isaac Freels, I think, gave Gallaher two slaves.
Mary Harris: Yeah, those are court records that you can find.
Audience member 5: And I have those, but these were from the Gallaher family. These were their slaves. They are down in the Gallaher, the Gallaher grave is there. Don, you may know something about it. You’re from Wheat.
Don Watson: Yeah, Bonita would, too. It’s close to K-25. Across the road where the observation tower is, there is a road that goes up by it from the river.
Audience member 5: It’s by the Gallaher cemetery.
Mick Wiest: There is a small sign there that says “slave cemetery”. By the way, there is a project that the Reservation Management Organization just reviewed. The highway is going to be widened through that area and we wrote into the contract to stay 100 feet away from that slave cemetery. That is one example of how this Land Use Management Committee tries to protect these resources.
Dorothy Moneymaker: A lot of slaves had the family name of whoever they were slaves.
Audience member 5: The slaves have a slab of concrete on them instead of a marker.
Mick Wiest: Right. I would like to ask Bonita Irwin to say a few words about the Wheat Reunion they have in October, and then maybe somebody can say a little about the New Bethel Homecoming that is going to be tomorrow.
Bonita Irwin: Ok. The Homecoming will be the first Sunday always in October we have a number of out-of-state people that come each year. One year we recorded 23 different states, and one couple came from Saudi Arabia to our Homecoming. So, it’s a well-known thing that we have in our community that brings our people back together. We would like to invite everyone to come, if you didn’t live there, don’t have any people from there, still you are perfectly welcome to come. Is that all you want me to say?
Mick Wiest: Tell them a little bit about your photo albums. You have one of the best histories, pictorial histories of that area.
Bonita Irwin: I have two photos, ‘course there is some repeats in some of them. Two photo albums back here that shows the school, dormitory, and a lot of the pictures of some of the homes in the Wheat Community, and I also have a flag that I will show later, okay?
Mick Wiest: We can display it on the table.
Bonita Irwin: And I would like to say that I was at the cemetery late yesterday afternoon, I took flowers over and it was in excellent shape. That’s number 7, Wheat Community. Get me started now. (Laughter) I would like to say that the Wheat school was the number one school in the state of Tennessee at one time, Kingston come second. So, we are real proud of that. In our school, we had people that came from-out of-state. And our sports programs we had out-of-state players you know that we get, just like colleges, and we’d recruit them. We were usually right up at the top with sports.
Dorothy Moneymaker: She knows ‘cause she’s one of them. (Laughter)
Bonita Irwin: We had three stores in our community, a service station and a post office. And Wheat was named from Frank, Dorothy you may help me out on this. From Frank Wheat. He was the first postmaster, wasn’t he?
Dorothy Moneymaker: Yep. It was known as Bald Hill before that.
Bonita Irwin: It’s Bald Hill. And then in the school we had a seminary first and then we had Roane College and we were real proud of that. I also have some pictures over here of the Roane College and I have with me some of the credits that was offered. Just a minute. Well anyhow, I have those credits with me that were offered in the Roane College. Our community life was pretty rambunctious, I would say. We swam we played, we had gatherings on Sunday afternoons and after work at night. The communities, the families would get together and just have a good time. We didn’t have television; we finally had radios that we didn’t care that much about them. We would rather play and work. Our people were hard working people, but we made a living. It has been mentioned in some of the radio, television programs that it’s a poor community and that we were ready to leave there, we wanted to move out. And that is farthest from the truth. Hey! We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had everything else it took to be happy. Roane College was established in 1885 with many coming on horseback to get to that college. Then Wheat School was established in 1908. But Roane College was active until 1916. At one of the banquets, the director of Atomic Energy spoke at the last banquet saying, “The might of our country lies in the cooperative effort of rural communities like yours not focused on concentration on population.” Also, an article was in the Journal reporting on the same banquet, saying, “People of Wheat not only speak cooperation, they practice it.” The New York Times also wrote of the beauty and the accomplishments of the Wheat community. The closeness lives on in our community. There is a lot of our families gone, but you can see the ones that struggles to get back to our Homecoming.
[Break in video]
Bonita Irwin: This is what our community was all about. We have 157 stars on here and I am sure that we did miss some, but these boys left to go into the service. When they came home, they had nowhere to go. We lost nine of our wonderful people. And we gave, this is World War II. The ones in gold is the ones that lost their lives. We appreciate you, Mick.
Mick Wiest: Well, we thank you. There was certainly a great deal of sacrifice from the people around here and we have a real debt of gratitude. Who else would like to- thank you, Bonita. (Applause) I know there is many experiences, some good, some bad. We like to hear from all of them. It was an important time.
Don Watson: I’ll say a little bit about Wheat, but I think that Dorothy could be the one that would give the best story on Wheat, because of the book she has written on Wheat if she would get up here, I’d sit down (Laughter). I’ll just give a little bit brief, the Watson family. I’m Don Watson. My great-great-grandfather was John Watson, came over from Ireland in about 1810, and he moved to south of Clinch River near Kingston and later bought a tract of land on the north side of the Clinch River in what is now the Community of Wheat. Through the years this building has been renovated four or five times, I have a few pictures there of it, but in the back of our farm, which I grew up, there were four generations that grew up on this same farm and in the back of the woods there is a cemetery that has John Smith. Now it this isn’t the John Smith from Pocahontas, I don’t think. But there was John Smith that was, I can’t detect the exact date of death, one is 1755, there were only two inscriptions on the graves there. One is Alexander Smith, and that is who my father, or great-grandfather bought the property from. I lived there until I graduated from Wheat High school in 1936. And the Depression was on and my dad was getting a little old, and I was the youngest of nine boys and one girl. All the boys thought they could do better away from home, and I thought I could too. So, I tried to get in the Navy, but I was turned down because of a football injury at that time. And then I went Tennessee Wesleyan College in Athens for a couple years. Incidentally, I ran into one of my friends, right here, which I know from before then, that went to Tennessee Wesleyan. But when I came out of the service then I lived in Harriman and they opened up a building across the street called the Clinton Engineering Works. And there was a fellow in there who is still in Oak Ridge, by the name of Joyce. Is he still here? He’s a lawyer, I think. Well, he was head of the office there in some way and I was in a hardware store across the street and he was always coming over and was very interested in the little trinkets in the hardware. But I remember him very well because he came in and out, but have had no connection since. But in ’42, in ’39, my father died and left my mother and sister and nephew in the Wheat Community. We had sold the large farm and had built a home just across from K-25 on Blair Road. And that home incidentally, is sitting outside of Blair Gate, Elza Gate up on the hill. Somebody told me who owned that and it has sandstone around it now. They moved that home from Wheat up to Oak Ridge. But in ’42, in December, I went into the service and I didn’t come back until ’46, and missed all the excitement here. We knew very little of what happened in Oak Ridge, but I was in Europe and during D-Day, and for quite a while there we had very little opportunity to know what was going on. But anyway, when we came back to Wheat, it was still a community that we all loved each other. And as I understand in ’42, they only went to school until December, and then they had to be pushed out and went to various other schools. I graduated in ’36, and there was a class of nine boys and nine girls. In 1981, we had our 45th anniversary and we had 100% participation. Everyone was back. Since that time, we have lost quite a few. And this year, we’ve lost three already. We had a memorial service a couple, three weeks ago in Dyllis. Part of those three, but anyway, Wheat was always a very close knit, I’m not saying boastfully, we’re not bragging, but we loved each other and we were close together and it was just a fine place to live. But my grandfather, as I say, came here in about 18 and 10, and my father’s name was George Jones, who was named after the George Jones Memorial Baptist Church there. It was his great-uncle. So, I have a lot of ties in the community, but now Dorothy Sellers-Moneymaker has written this book. If you don’t have one, you ought to get it. I’m not advertising for her, but you should get it. Her grandfather rode a mare to deliver mail all over Bethel Valley and back to Wheat. And sometimes at 11 o’clock at night on a cold night you could hear that old horse clattering down the road. It would be Mike Sellers delivering the mail. Why it took him so long, somebody along the way, “Mr. Sellers could you stop at the Grocery store and get me some lemon, Watkins lemon, or this and that?” And he would take it in a special packet and deliver it and talk to them. But he was a fine person. And then her daddy, Smith Sellers, was a rural mail carrier.
Dorothy Moneymaker: And he would take people bread and stuff.
Don Watson: And her mother was an excellent cook. If you don’t believe it, look in the museum over there at that lady that is standing there with the canned fruits and things, that was her mother.
Bonita Irwin: It’s in the book, I have a picture in the hallway.
Don Watson: But anyway you’ll have to say that the Wheat Community, we are boastful, but we are proud of it and there are other good communities too. That’s all about I have to say and thank you! (Applause)
Mick Wiest: Ok let’s-
Lady in Purple: We were rivals of the Wheat basketball team, we had a great rivalry, I lived up in the Robertsville Community up the road a piece, and we had a rivalry with the Wheat basketball team.
Don Watson: I remember playing baseball against County Hill.
Lady: Oh yeah.
Bonita Irwin: We were real rivals, wasn’t we?
Lady: Yeah we really were. And here is a little piece of paper when we were cleaning out my grandfather’s affects that I found. It is the, and many of you may have saved this, it’s the Declaration of Taking. He came home one day and he found this attached to the door. “You are here by commanded to notify James M. Jet, Edgemoor, Tennessee“, that was our address, although we lived in the Robertsville Community, “are his tenant. R.R. Agents here to fore on the nineteenth day of February, 1943, a judgment of the Declaration of Taking, number seventeen, filed in the above entitled proceedings, gave the United States of America possession of track number blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Anderson County in connection with the establishment of the Kingston Demolition Range. On the nineteenth day of February, and to forthwith vacate said premises immediately. You’re further commanded that if none of these parties are found in actual procession of said premises to post a copy of this notice at a conspicuous place upon the premises.” So, that is how he knew, we knew, we heard rumors, but that is how we knew we had to move. Does anyone have one of these?
Don Watson: I have one at home. Mine was mailed to me in Europe. (laughter)
Lady: Well and speaking of cemeteries my great-grandparents, my grandparents, and my parents are all buried in the cemetery behind Willow Brook School in the church, which was the Robertsville Baptist Church.
Don Watson: Since you’re bragging about Robertsville, I remember us playing them in a tournament. We had won 22 games and lost one that year. They had Dorothy Fox, who was an all-tournament, and-
Lady: Hackworth?
Bonita Irwin: I played against Mary Hackworth.
Don Watson: And Lee Price and some of those.
Lady: Well, who won?
Bonita Irwin: We did.
Lady: Shouldn’t have asked.
Don Watson: That’s why I’m boastful.
Lady: I thought you were going to say, “We won all those games, but Robertsville came in and took us.”
Don Watson: They had a good team. Coach Davis.
Lady in Green: I’ve got a little story.
Mick Wiest: Ok.
Lady in Green: She told about moving out. Uncle Jim Freels once got the little picture in that magazine. He was upset and sort of mad and contrary and he would not move out when the time come. (Laughter) He had to go to the police in Oak Ridge and get a permit to move out. That made him mad. They gave him a paper of what he could take with him. Uncle John Jones that lived up at the steam plant did the same thing, but he moved out after dark. He just had to go across the river bridge there. But Uncle Jim had to go and get a permit to move out.
Mick Wiest: Yes I have heard some of the stories about how those who were the last to go.
Lady in Green: He was mad and he went to work as a guard in Oak Ridge and he wouldn’t cash his checks because they were his. So he got a letter one day telling him he had to cash them or they would discard them. He told them that they were his and he would do what he wanted to with them. I think he went and put them in the bank then. That’s a little story of that day and why his picture is in the store.
Mick Wiest: I want Dorothy Moneymaker to say a few words. She wrote the book “We’ll call it Wheat”, and by the way you can get copies of this from Dorothy. There are also copies at the Oak Ridge Library. Here you are Dorothy.
Barbara McCall-Ely: You can’t take them out.
Dorothy Moneymaker: No, they don’t sell.
Barbara McCall-Ely: You just have to look at them.
Dorothy Moneymaker: I wanna tell you about, we didn’t get out in time either. We was suppose to be out by the last day of December in 1942, but you must remember that they didn’t tell you how much you were going to be paid for the land, nor when they were going to give it to you. My husband and I had been married for 8 years and we lived in the, well we’ll say the Wheat community, it’s under restriction now, can’t get in there. So we wasn’t moved out and the guard would come by and sit and watch what you were doing. We had a contract with a place in Knoxville where they bought our eggs. We had a great big chicken farm. We had been married 8 years, but we didn’t have any children, we were expecting our first child. So we were in there. When labor hit me on the 14th, well on the 13th of January in 1943 we went off down to the gate on Blair Road and they wouldn’t let us out to go to the hospital in Harriman because we didn’t have a pass. (Laughter) So my husband had to get in touch with Dr. Hecker in Oliver Springs and he come by and brought his nurse and they let us through. I don’t know what in the world they would have done if they made us stay any longer. (laughter) but we didn’t move out until April in 1943, when we went down to that same gate they unloaded everything you had on the truck and my husband was already working for the fire department in Oak Ridge and they still wouldn’t let us stay. And he came in from work one day and I was taking the screen wire off the windows and doors. And he said, “What in the world you doing that for?” I said, “I’m going to take it with us”. You couldn’t buy it back during the war ‘cause everything was going for something else and so he said, “We’ll never get out with that”. So when we got down there at that gate and was unloading everything. My quilts was in a wooden box with a top on top of it nailed down. And they undone it and was a searching in there and the man turned to the big Ike and said, “There is nothing but quilts and blankets and sheets”. He said, “Well, just put the top back on it”, and he did. And don’t forget that that screen wire was on the bottom of that box. (laughter) Then he, when the City of Oak Ridge took over from the Government they made firemen move back in so we moved back 36 years ago, not to the Wheat Community, we are in Oak Ridge. Yeah. If you want one of my books I’ve got 100 still. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren got to wanting one ‘cause it was about their parents and so forth. And they could find generations, four generations back there. And you can call me at 483-0013 and be sure you say 483, you’ll get McDonalds if you don’t. (laughter)
Don Watson: Let me say one thing about this lady.
Mick Wiest: Ok, and then we’ve got a question right back there.
Don Watson: I want to say one thing. In high school she was one of those petite, nice, young ladies. She came to spend the night with my sister one time. We had, you know, we had parlors back then, and nobody was allowed there except when you had company. We had one of those stand-up phonographs, wind-up you know, and music. She was on our front porch and they had the window open, and she was doing the Charleston. (laughter) My dad came in and said, “Young lady, you are welcome to our house any time you wish, but you will not dance”. So she quit.
Dorothy Moneymaker: I did the Black Bottom too, and I’ll tell you, I never missed a beat.
Mick Wiest: Thank you very much. Now we have a question here.
Lady in white- back row: Dorothy, were you the woman I spoke to several years ago on the phone, you told me about washing your diapers in the stream? Was that you?
Dorothy Moneymaker: Yeah, the water supply in that time after 1943 come and that baby was born you couldn’t hardly get diapers and I used some feed sacks, chicken feed sacks to make diapers and I had to go across the road where there was a stream from a spring and I would wash it out and that guy that come and sat and looked to see what you were doing. One day he come and asked, “What you doing down there?” I said, “I’m a washing baby you-know-what.” And he never did stop again. (laughter)
Barbara McCall-Ely: Tell them about the time the guy told you had to get out. The guy that told you had to get out and you were still pregnant.
Dorothy Moneymaker: Oh yeah. He come up when my husband was at work and he come and knocked on the door and he informed me that “we HAD to get out”. I kind of backed up from the door so he could see- the young’un was 8 pounds and four ounces so you know I wasn’t little. I said, “Sir, didn’t you know that there was a law in the state of Tennessee that says that you cannot evict a pregnant woman?” “No, I didn’t know that” and he never came back. And in my book, I want you to know right now that anything dirty I knew; I didn’t put it in there. (laughter)
Don Watson: I’ll vouch for that.
Mick Wiest: Anybody else? Ok.
Barbara McCall-Ely: I was one of the younger ones.
Mick Wiest: Ok. We are going to wrap this up here in a few minutes. We have the photo albums to look at, we’ve got a couple posters, and we’ve got the evaluation forms which I will hand out in just a couple of minutes. Last chance to for anyone to offer any experience or any stories.
Bonita Irwin: I understand that the last few days we’ve not done as much research on this as we would have like to. These ladies here are my first cousins. Our mothers lived in this house. My grandfather, our great-grandfather gave all the land for down at Bethel for the church and the cemetery. His name was Samuel Taylor.
Dorothy Moneymaker: Tell them about the Wheat Community being centered on religion and education. You know that.
Bonita Irwin: Yeah, I know it, but you can tell it better. (laughter)
Dorothy Moneymaker: The Community was based on religion and education. George Jones Minister, where that church house is, anyway, he didn’t have anyone to leave his property to and he left 259 acres or something, anyway, anybody that wanted to build a church could do it free of charge, no taxes, and as for education there were 22 houses on the property and anybody that had somebody connected to the education system or religion could live in those free of charge. The water was furnished too, but they had to go somewhere to carry it in. I could kind of show you if I was down there. Where it went from where to where. Have you ever paid any attention to the marker where the overpass for the Lenoir City is, down toward K-25? Well it started along down in there and went up to Blair Road and then it went from the top of one ridge to the top of another one. I could talk some more, but I won’t. I’ll hush.
Bonita Irwin: There were three denominations.
Dorothy Moneymaker: Yeah, there were three denominations, Baptist, Common Presbyterian, and Methodist. And we had what you call “circuit riding preachers”. On the first Sunday of the month, we went to the Baptist Church. We had Sunday school. My daddy was Sunday school superintendent for years; her daddy was a deacon, or maybe he was an elder, I don’t know. Anyway, we would go there the first Sunday and have Sunday and the preacher would preach, and then on the second Sunday we would go to the Common Presbyterian, well now the third Sunday we went to the Common Presbyterian Church. Anyway, we went from one church to the other every week and everyone would come. One Sunday was a Baptist preacher, one was a Common Presbyterian preacher, and the next was a Baptist preacher and all of us young’uns would be so ticked on the Sundays when we didn’t have a preacher (laughter) because we all got out and played together.
[Break in video]
Barbara McCall-Ely: I was one of the younger ones that left. I was 11 years old when they told us we had to leave home. My brother was 13. My brother didn’t like those men that came in and knocked on the walls. He said, “What you knocking on the house walls for?” “We need to. We need to see about this house, how sound it is.” Well, you know, he didn’t think it was necessary. Well, as they were walking out the door, my brother kicked one of them on the shin. The man turned around and said, “Why boy what are you doing?” He said, “This is my house and you’re not welcome here. Good-bye.” Well, when we started to leave home, all of our farms had a name. And ours was “Edgewood”. We forgot to take our sign down off from over front porch. We thought we had everything, but we didn’t. And it was in their pictures, the government’s pictures. And my brother said, “Granddaddy, I sure want to take our sign.” So granddaddy lifted him up and he was going to get our sign. The government of course was watching, and they said, “No, you won’t. That’s ours.” Gene said, “But it’s the name of our home.” But anyway, we didn’t get our sign. My brother and I as they slammed the gate on us, down at Blair Road. I hate them, we never got to go back home. It’s still restricted. I never laid eyes on it. But I understand that all they did with our homes was bulldoze them off the hills. They never used them. Why they wanted to go in our homes and invade it, I don’t know. But they just bulldozed them off of the hills. So all the stuff that they said we couldn’t have just went in the ground. And that’s fine. I understand that perhaps I will be able to look at Wheat, (break in video) my home from a distance someday. One man told me that they would take me over as close as they could get to my home. Just to look at it. I’m 66 now, I left at 11. I’m one of them that I went to school at Wheat until December in 1942; I went to Dyllis from December to April of ’93.
Voice off Camera: ’43.
Barbara McCall-Ely: Ok. ’43. Well we moved to Cartive, which is Rockwood area. We went from Dyllis to Cartive which was, the building was just one building and every class was in there. And my brother and I didn’t really care for that. But anyway, we went there for the rest of ’43. Then Grandmother and Granddaddy then got us in Rockwood in the later part of ’43. They say that teenagers have a lot of trouble nowadays. We had a lot of trouble, and we were very bitter at the government and everything else. Granddaddy said, “This would be something that would bring our boys back, the war is going to be over, and everyone would be coming back”. Sydney Arnold died, K.B. Johnson died. I mean, there were just so many things that when we kept saying, “When is it all going to be over?” We didn’t get up and shoot anybody, and we didn’t get up and knife anybody. We could have those government men, I think (laughter), but we didn’t do it. I remember Mr. Jess Jones. Now I know his girls and they had a picture of them in the paper, and it said his pretty daughters, Della and Lucille. And I’m still good friends with Lucille. She was a classmate of mine. Mr. Jess Jones said, “I’m not leaving”. Well, Mr. Jess did but it wasn’t the way he wanted to. But there were many of them and I can remember growing up in a community where, my mother and father were divorced and all the Wheat High School kids, everybody just if we wanted to go somewhere to a ball game or something, we just managed to get there because we were little guys, and everybody sort of looked after us. Everybody knew Barbara and Gene McCall. Because they just, we were just part of the community, so they took good care of us. We had grandparents as I have said many times, my grandmother said, “Don’t you ever talk about anybody around here because you are kin to them”. We were from the Smiths, the McKinneys, the Roberts and the Stubbs. Really everyone was kin to us somehow. That was one thing I learned real early in life, don’t talk about people cause they’re your kin folks. I love the people that are still living. We are burying quite a few of them that I knew at an early age. Marvin Stonecipher, we lost him last year. So many of them, Lee Alan Arnold, Gene Arnold. We lost so many of them suddenly and some of those, two of them, Gene and Lee Alan was in Don Watson’s class. We were just like a big family. I didn’t know I didn’t belong to everybody and it was a loving community.
Mick Wiest: Thank you very much, Barbara. (applause) Ok, if there’s no one else that wants to add anything, we are going to go ahead and close this and give everybody an opportunity to look at what we have on the table.
Lady in Green: I was raised up here at Scarboro
Mick Wiest: Yes.
Lady in Green: I can talk without that. [referring to microphone]
Mick Wiest: Well they need to hear you a little bit.
Lady in Green: In other words a big house. At one time Scarboro had a telephone office that we could call to Knoxville or Clinton or wherever. And then we had I know of three doctors. Dr. Lee and Dr. Simons. What was the other one, Nadine? And they all weren’t there at one time. We had two grist mills, a lumber mill, a (inaudible) and three grocery stores and for this and a little post office at my house where my daddy carried the mail out of Edgemoor. The route number 1 man would bring him the mail and he would route it there. Go through Robertsville and down to Pine Ridge and then back up the valley and I guess he would meet the Wheat postmaster somewhere. And then we had 3 ponds and these ponds were for the grist mills. Whenever the people would bring corn or wheat, I don’t think they ground wheat; they take that to Lenoir City. We had 2 churches, Common Presbyterian Church and when we were talking about the Common Presbyterian in Wheat, I use to go down to camp, church camp down at Wheat High School when they would have a camp there. But we had a close knit community and as I said a lot of the teachers and a lot of the doctors and everything was there. We didn’t have much money, but we weren’t poor. And we had plenty. We didn’t have any electricity at that time. We had to carry water from the spring, but I was lucky. We had a well on our back porch. And It was sad because the people that were notified to move out, word had got out to the other counties and they raised the prices of houses and a lot of the people from around here, around Scarboro didn’t have bank accounts. They couldn’t borrow money to buy a house with. A lot of the families moved in two or three families in one house until they could find something. It was sad. But people were humble and went ahead. I know we moved in ’35. They consolidated the two mail routes. My daddy, we moved to Harriman then. He carried the mail out of Harriman. We were a happy family. Nadine lived out over this way. And to come down to the Freels Bend, you either come by buggy, you had to come through a big creek up here where the creek comes through. Grandpa Freels went to the bend, and if he was on Old Ben we knew we couldn’t go with him. If he was in the buggy we could bum a ride and go down to Nadine’s. It is a lot of material, of feelings and things like that. And people worked together and shared together. Not like it is now. And poor old people that went out, most of the land was inherited and they moved north, east, south and west. Where ever they could find something. And a lot of the people hadn’t even been out of the county, didn’t know which way to go. Didn’t have transportation to go.
Dorothy Moneymaker: And we had gotten, our area had gotten a lot of the people when they took the Smoky Mountains. We got a lot of people. And when they started Norris Dam, we got a lot of people. God rest them, they hardly got their things put down, when they had to move again.
Lady in Green: John Rice Irwin was one of them.
Nadine___ : Well everybody, (inaudible) Freels Cabin. But I was the only Freels family that actually lived in Freels Bend. If you go right across the ridge over on the other side, it’s on the Clinch River. It’s where we lived when they took the area over and we were the only Freels family that had lived in the bend for I guess 25-30 years. So I’m one of the last ones that lived in Freels Bend. And the only way we could get out was with a horse or buggy until I was in about the fourth grade. And when I was in the fourth grade they got this road that goes down through here, goes around the bend. They got a school bus around. I went to Scarboro School. My mother was a school teacher so she taught my brother and I. When we started school, I was in the third grade and he was in the second grade.
Mick Wiest: I think I heard that John Freels also was one of the last to go.
Nadine___ : No, now John Freels lived on the other side of the river, he didn’t in this side of Freels Bend.
Mick Wiest: There was a Freels, a man who didn’t want to leave. [inaudible]
Lady in Green: Jim Freels.
Mick Wiest: He didn’t leave until there was a threat of arrest if he didn’t go.
Nadine___ : Well we had to come over here to get our mail. The mail came down this far. I can remember as a small child walking across the ridge to get our mail.
Mick Wiest: Well that’s great. (applause) I want to give everybody a big thank you.
[End of Video]

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Life in the Oak Ridge Area before 1942
Presented by Lockheed Martin
Led by Mick Wiest
April 18, 1998
[Note: This was a video from the American Museum of Science and Energy. Presented at the Freels Bend Cabin Site, Mick Wiest with the Reservation Management Organization of Lockheed Martin Energy Systems Environmental Compliance Organization provides brief prehistoric and historic accounts of the area along with several long-time residents who give first-hand accounts of life before the Manhattan Project, on Saturday, April 18, 1998. This was one of six presentations that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the American Museum of Science and Energy co-sponsored.]
Mick Wiest: Welcome everyone to the Reservation, the DOE Oak Ridge Reservation. This is a history talk sponsored by DOE and Oak Ridge National Lab and the American Museum of Science and Energy. And if you haven’t had a chance to look at the display that they have on early Oak Ridge, I invite you to do so. They did an excellent job on that. I want to thank Mack Baker for his video work. He is with Lockheed Martin. My name is Mick Wiest, and I am with Lockheed Martin. I help with a group called the Reservation Management Organization and their job is to stay in compliance with the many federal state and local laws and governing what we do, the activities, new projects that come in, and also on-going activities. We try to stay in compliance with those regulations. One of my duties is looking at cultural resources and making sure that we comply with the National Historic Preservation Act. This resource that you are sitting here on, the Freels Cabin, is one that dates way back to before the Civil War. It’s an important one and we do a number of programs out here. One that is going on today with a group, Chris Light is having a group out here looking at nature, I believe it is. And there are programs scheduled throughout the year. We have other cultural resources on the reservation, the Bethel Valley Church nearby, we also have, oh, by the way, Bethel Valley Church will be having their homecoming tomorrow, and the George Jones Memorial Baptist Church, which is in the Wheat Community, they have their homecoming in October. Maybe Bonita Irwin can tell us a little bit more about that. And also this site being on the National Register of Historic Places is one of seven that DOE has. The other three are the checking stations, one on Oak Ridge Turnpike, one at Scarboro Road and Bear Creek Road, and the one on Bethel Valley Road. In a few minutes I will be introducing Mary Harris, the Anderson County Historian, and we are fortunate to have her come out and speak to us. And we also hope that some of you will share some of your experiences from those days, living in those communities that make up this area. There was Scarboro, Robertsville, there was the Wheat Community and the Gravel Hill Community, not too far from here.
One of the things that has impressed me the most is looking at an aerial photograph taken in 1942 of this area. It is quite different from aerial photos you will see today. There was very much cleared land, there was a lot of crop and pasture land out here, the ridge tops were mostly wooded, but it was surprising how much of a farming community this was. It is certainly turned back to forest now.
We’re standing on historic ground, one reason because of this cabin, it was here back before the Civil War and it is one of the best preserved cabins, it is the best one on the Oak Ridge Reservation, and certainly for many miles around. We have some of the descendants of the Freels family here today. This land was also historic because it was home to our Native Americans. Right here on Freels Bend, we have a few Indian mounds that have been surveyed by archeologists. They are significant and we know, artifacts have been found that go back several thousand years. In the last few hundred years, this was the home of the Cherokee, and they were an advanced tribe, most of them were farmers. They had their own written language and even their own national newspaper, but as we know, they were forced out of their land about 1838. That wasn’t far from the date that we think this cabin was built. We think about 1840 to 1850, this cabin was built.
The third reason that this area is historic is because of the Manhattan Project, and that project, a lot of people don’t realize that it was the largest, single industrial project in the history of the world. And for that reason alone, it is quite significant to remember what went on here. A lot has been said about Oak Ridge and the Manhattan Project, so we won’t get into that much today. What we want to do is talk about the days before 1942, and I want to mention that we have some evaluation forms. I’d like you to fill those out at the close of our talk. Like to hear what you have to say about it, also there is a small form if you have questions of me or comments on how DOE manages these cultural resources, we’d like to hear from you on that.
Right now I would like to introduce Mary Harris. She is the Anderson County historian. She has been very helpful in answering my questions as they come along. If you need to reach Mary she is, her office is at the Court House, Anderson County Court House. So, I would like to turn it over to Mary.
Mary Harris: Thank you, Mick. Appreciate the opportunity to get to come out here. This is the first time I have ever been to the cabin. And I am sure there are more of you all here that can tell me about the history than I can tell you. But being a native, my grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents were in Tennessee before Tennessee became a state. I qualify as being a first Tennessean. My ancestors were married in 1794. So, it makes me proud to think that I am a Tennessean.
First time I met Mick, I got involved with Anderson County cemeteries and doing so much genealogy and family research and what not, cemeteries fascinated me. And when I got into one, instead of just picking out my ancestors, I started recording all of the cemeteries. So, in Anderson County I recorded three hundred and ten cemeteries, in Anderson County. Over three hundred ten cemeteries, over twenty-seven thousand tombstone inscriptions. And the book does have all of the cemeteries that are in the restricted area of Anderson County. Our cemeteries are slowly being deteriorated. And there are some of them that I would just sit and would cry when I would go into some of them. I really got involved in doing genealogy and historical work. Let me put it this way; if you do genealogy, you have got to enjoy history, because it is history. This area like I said, goes back from my ancestors prior to statehood, and then when I got involved in helping other people, when I started with my own family. Of course our family was a generated family of this is your aunt, this is your great-aunt, these are your cousins, and we were a close knit family. Daddy was a coal miner and he left Tennessee and went to Texas. And I got borned in Texas. So the old saying is if you lose your ancestors go to Texas, you know. But then Daddy came back to Tennessee, came back home, and then he went into Kentucky. So I was raised and got my education in Kentucky. But every chance and opportunity that we got we’d go home, go home. Kentucky was not my home; it is still not my home. Tennessee was home. So, when I married a Kentuckian boy, and he went to work for Union Carbide, and every chance he had he’d say, “I’ve got to go home”, I’d say, “Well, I’m already home”. But as time grew, and I would be downtown or something, I’d wave at some body, he’d say, “Who’s that?”, I’d say, “That’s my cousin.” He would make the remark, “You’re related to everybody in Anderson County.” I said, “Campbell County and Roane County.” (Laughter) and he said, “Well, I didn’t have any.” And I said, “Oh, everyone has lots of ancestors.” So, I said, “We will find you some.” And low and behold, I started. His four-great grandfather got married in Blount County. So, I brought him back home and we have a complete cycle back once again.
It just enjoys my soul to think that when I help you and anyone else that I come in contact with, hey, I know that family and when I started working on the court records, preserving the court records, at the Court House, which was a voluntary job that I took on. Three years, I cleaned and salvaged and organized all the old court records. Some of them go back to early 1805, was some of the earliest ones I found. I got them cataloged, I got them indexed by surname. I had took them to Nashville, had them microfilmed and now they are at the archives in Nashville, we have a copy of the microfilm in the Clinton Library, the index is there. We are up through, the only county in the state of Tennessee that has all of their loose records microfilmed up through the confidentiality period. So, if you’re looking for anything, we can almost find it. But it thrills me to know that I can come in contact with you people and in doing my research, and cleaning the papers, I’d get tickled when I’d be reading some of the articles, the papers, I’d think, “Oh, I know where that person is buried”, because I had finished the cemetery book. And I get involved with these families as well as my own.
When Mick called me, the first time I met him, they had put an article in the plant paper and my nephew saw it and he called me and said, “Aunt Sue,” he said, “I think you need to get in touch with Mick Wiest. He’s found a cemetery”. So I called him and he said, “I don’t think it’s been recorded.” So he took my husband and I down, it’s in Roane county, but it had not been recorded. We went in and it was the Manley family. I did research on the family and at one time that was the main road that went into Roane County and they had an inn where they house people with the stage coach. So you can see how much history you can get by just going backwards. I know we live in a fast pace today, but when you get to talking, several of you today, and how close we are knitted. The lady that was right here, we were talking and she said, “Oh, Tiffany Harris.” That is my granddaughter and her granddaughter are roommates at UTC, Chattanooga. So, you see what a small world we really live in. But I just recently, at the end of December, coauthored our bicentennial history book of Anderson County. There are over 200 pictures that we acquired and published in this book. And in one of the pictures, I know the Jones family. There is the ferry there at Edgemoor, which would be in that direction I think, is that not right, Mick?
Mick Wiest: Yes.
Mary Harris: OK, they lived in that area. They were neighbors of the Freels. And so when I get to talking to these people, it’s amazing, how much we all are in a sense neighbors still yet. And I picked up out of my Goodspeed book, the particular one on this one was J.N. Freels. Said he was one of the prominent citizens of the North Civil District of Anderson County and was a merchant of Scarborotown and they didn’t separate Scarborotown, it was all one word, I was surprised by that. Says he was born June the first, 1840 in Anderson County and he was the son of William S. and Maria Tunnell-Freels. They were both natives of Anderson County. Of course, you know, the Tunnell family is going down the old highway, said that the father was born 1800 and he was the son of Isaac Freels and he was a farmer, died in 1886. The mother was born 1809 and the daughter of Jessie Tunnell. She died in 1851. Says he was reared on the farm and attended the schools of the neighborhood. He worked on the farm until the breaking out of the Civil War, in which he enlisted in February of 1862 in the Federal Army. And apparently his schooling paid off because he was in the quartermaster department as a clerk. In 1863, he was appointed a second lieutenant and in the Thirteenth Regiment of the Tennessee. He served as the rest of the war and mustered out from the service in Knoxville in 1865. He returned home in 1867 and began his merchandising at Scarborotown. He was commissioned post office of the town in 1876. He married July 1870, Julie Hoskins. And once again there is another family that we are all associated with. It says to the union there were seven children been born and to the subject the wife is a Methodist Episcopal Church. It is good to know that they put that down.
I’m a collector’s bug. I have a habit of anything that I can collect, I collect. I’m a pack rat in other words. I came across something at an estate sale. And books, maps, anything of history takes my eye first. And I came across this, A Historical View of Oak Ridge: The pre-Oak Ridge Community at Kathy’s Kitchen”. This is prior to when Oak Ridge was built. It just so happened that there is a picture of the Freels cabin in this little pamphlet. And then the William Freels Home, which is on Bethel Valley Road, Cure Home, it goes right into Scarboro, Bethel Church, and the Worthington home, which was right at the Elza Gate. There is also a little Worthington cemetery there which would be just around the bend, and of course Elza Gate and once again inside the store. This is the Robertsville School. And I know all of you have pictures and can reminisce and know more than I did.
I can remember my grandparents lived in the Campbell County area when TVA built Norris Dam. They had to sell out and move. They took their land. They moved to Dyllis Community. And then when Oak Ridge came along they had to move again. So I feel for them, but I am thankful that they were ready and willing to go along with progress. I can remember as a child when we came to see them that we, that was before the bypass was put in, we would have to come to the gate, and Daddy would have to get a guard, security guard to go with us, drive through the Oak Ridge area until we would get to the other side, to go and see my grandparents. I’m sure that some of you could tell me more than I know of this area, but I am thankful that I have the opportunity to meet all of you and put more insight on what our ancestors did to make what we are today.
I invite any and all of you if you want to do any family research, come and see me, I’ll do what I can. I have my own library at home that I do research, but as I am at the Court House from 8:30 to 4:30. I bring my lunch, so I don’t leave out. So if I can help anybody that is involved, I’d be more than glad and I do appreciate the opportunity, Mick, to come here today to see such a view. Could you imagine how Mr. Freels felt when he stood on this piece of land and said, “This is home”, and look out to see what he could see. It thrills me to know that I am a part of being a great Tennessean. Thank you. Yes ma’am.
Audience member 1 (white shirt, lady next to man in hat): A lot of cemeteries in this area, the writing on the tombstones are obscure. Were you able to find in cases like that who was buried there?
Mary Harris: What I did, I carried what we call carpenter chalk and a soft brush. I would take and brush the debris from it, and then take a piece of carpenters chalk and rub on it and the imprints of the writing, and then I would also take a piece of paper, a real thin piece of paper with a black pencil and I would trace the letters. One particular incident that I found that really fascinated me and took me a long time to decipher. Of course, Anderson County is the second county that I have recorded, cemeteries I have recorded. I recorded Marion County. This one particular tombstone that I was reading, started out was born so and so, this just doesn’t make any sense. So I copied each letter, each line on down to the very bottom and I thought, “Well, how in this world can I decipher this?” What they had done was they started writing this line, and then came back down this and then down this way until they got down to the very bottom. And I finally figured it out. There is so much on a tombstone that you wouldn’t believe how much information, you can get a death date then you can go and read deeds, you can read wills, you can read court records, where if there wasn’t a will probated, you can get the whole family history from some court records. One particular one that I had, sorry Mick, I get started, Mick, and I can’t stop.
Mick Wiest: That’s fine.
Mary Harris: There was one family of mine that I had pretty well documented. Everything that I knew and I thought that this is it. Until I started cleaning the court records. In 1843, this ancestor had died leaving no will, but he had 470 acres of land. So I thought well now there has to be a distribution some place. It just so happen that when the land had to be sold, we called a patrician suit, all the heirs had to sign their permission to sell the piece of property. Four of them went to Missouri and in these documents they had to give their depositions then they listed their children. Then I was able to go to Missouri and find all of their families even to descendants today. So you see you can, there are so many things of our history that has been preserved if we just look at it. and I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to serve as a historian, I love history, I love people, I love there, I love what they do, and many a time they kid me and say, when I get out into a cemetery, I say, “Well I take my lunch because I sit and eat with them.” The quietest place there is. The only thing there is that I ask sometimes that they talk to me. My husband always says, “What would you do if they did?” I said, “I’d run like crazy!” (Laughter) But it is a lot of fun. In doing the cemeteries I have met some of the nicest people of our counties. People say, “You don’t want to go into that section, you don’t want to go in that area.” It’s not so. If you go looking for trouble, you’re going to find it. My husband and I one day we hiked 15 miles up above Laurel Grove to find a cemetery. We found it, but it was neat, clean. And you would think no way would people come way up here to clean a little family plot. But it was. It just fascinates me to know. And this really sets my day off. I told Mick, I was trying to beg off because I had a trip planned this morning and he said, “No, I’ll move it up to 9:30 if you can come”. And I am so glad that you did, Mick. And I wouldn’t have missed it for nothing in this world. I can relate back to you Freels now. I say I’ve been there and that is something.
Nadine___: What about the cemetery at Scarboro where they don’t have any markers, how did you record who was buried there?
Mary Harris: Well if there was no marker I have no way of knowing other than if I can find a court record or I could find an old document that said so and so died and their buried at the Scarboro Cemetery.
Nadine___: Because when they clean that off they was just markers that they just mowed over and broken and put them over the fence.
Mary Harris: That’s right. They still done that. There was one up in part of the county that it wasn’t like that. But this person from out of state bought the property; they took and threw the stones in the river.
Nadine___: They threw them over the fence because I’ve been there when there was a pile here and a pile there on that side.
Mary Harris: But if they didn’t have a marker other than where I did that cemetery where Mick found. I did some research and I went back and it told…
Nadine___: So there is no way of having…
Mary Harris: A complete. No, no way, but it is interesting in taking a family in a community and start piecing them all together. Through census, through court records, through church records, you can eventually get a big part of them. Yeah, you sure can. Thank you. (Applause)
Mick Wiest: Mary was mentioning the cemeteries. We have got thirty-one on what is today’s Oak Ridge Reservation. It is about thirty-five thousand acres, but originally it was about fifty-nine thousand. There were about seventy cemeteries at that time. Some had to be moved. Many today are being cared for by the City of Oak Ridge, but DOE [ Department of Energy] maintains thirty-one of them. We do keep the areas mowed, we repair the fences and you are able to visit them. Some are in areas and you’ve got to call the lab shift superintendent, or the plant shift superintendent, but you can get in there to see them.
Mary Harris: You do better than TVA. TVA won’t keep theirs clean.
Mick Wiest: Well, thank you, Mary.
Barbara McCall-Ely: They do a beautiful job of taking care of the ones that we have. You call them and they take care of them.
Mary Harris: They do, they do. There was a little park down in Chattanooga. They had a TVA guard that lived there on a trailer, maintaining the park, and there was a little cemetery right in the park. They fenced it off and it had grown up. I ask him, “Why don’t you take care of it?” “That is not my plot.” So, I appreciate you.
Audience Member 4 (male black shirt far end of porch): Have you been able to identify any of the people in the slave cemetery, AEC number two, down across from K-25?
Mary Harris: No, your slave people. There are about three cemeteries that have got slaves in them. There is one in Lake City and there is one up on 61, going up toward Andersonville, and one outside, there’s two outside Lake City.
Lady in Green: There is one down here by K-25. The Gallahers.
Nadine___: There is one on Edgemoor Road too.
Don Watson: There on, down where the Gallaher Ferry was near K-25.
Audience member 4: Do you know any of the slaves that were buried there? I know they were Gallaher slaves.
Audience member 5: I have records where Freels, Isaac Freels, I think, gave Gallaher two slaves.
Mary Harris: Yeah, those are court records that you can find.
Audience member 5: And I have those, but these were from the Gallaher family. These were their slaves. They are down in the Gallaher, the Gallaher grave is there. Don, you may know something about it. You’re from Wheat.
Don Watson: Yeah, Bonita would, too. It’s close to K-25. Across the road where the observation tower is, there is a road that goes up by it from the river.
Audience member 5: It’s by the Gallaher cemetery.
Mick Wiest: There is a small sign there that says “slave cemetery”. By the way, there is a project that the Reservation Management Organization just reviewed. The highway is going to be widened through that area and we wrote into the contract to stay 100 feet away from that slave cemetery. That is one example of how this Land Use Management Committee tries to protect these resources.
Dorothy Moneymaker: A lot of slaves had the family name of whoever they were slaves.
Audience member 5: The slaves have a slab of concrete on them instead of a marker.
Mick Wiest: Right. I would like to ask Bonita Irwin to say a few words about the Wheat Reunion they have in October, and then maybe somebody can say a little about the New Bethel Homecoming that is going to be tomorrow.
Bonita Irwin: Ok. The Homecoming will be the first Sunday always in October we have a number of out-of-state people that come each year. One year we recorded 23 different states, and one couple came from Saudi Arabia to our Homecoming. So, it’s a well-known thing that we have in our community that brings our people back together. We would like to invite everyone to come, if you didn’t live there, don’t have any people from there, still you are perfectly welcome to come. Is that all you want me to say?
Mick Wiest: Tell them a little bit about your photo albums. You have one of the best histories, pictorial histories of that area.
Bonita Irwin: I have two photos, ‘course there is some repeats in some of them. Two photo albums back here that shows the school, dormitory, and a lot of the pictures of some of the homes in the Wheat Community, and I also have a flag that I will show later, okay?
Mick Wiest: We can display it on the table.
Bonita Irwin: And I would like to say that I was at the cemetery late yesterday afternoon, I took flowers over and it was in excellent shape. That’s number 7, Wheat Community. Get me started now. (Laughter) I would like to say that the Wheat school was the number one school in the state of Tennessee at one time, Kingston come second. So, we are real proud of that. In our school, we had people that came from-out of-state. And our sports programs we had out-of-state players you know that we get, just like colleges, and we’d recruit them. We were usually right up at the top with sports.
Dorothy Moneymaker: She knows ‘cause she’s one of them. (Laughter)
Bonita Irwin: We had three stores in our community, a service station and a post office. And Wheat was named from Frank, Dorothy you may help me out on this. From Frank Wheat. He was the first postmaster, wasn’t he?
Dorothy Moneymaker: Yep. It was known as Bald Hill before that.
Bonita Irwin: It’s Bald Hill. And then in the school we had a seminary first and then we had Roane College and we were real proud of that. I also have some pictures over here of the Roane College and I have with me some of the credits that was offered. Just a minute. Well anyhow, I have those credits with me that were offered in the Roane College. Our community life was pretty rambunctious, I would say. We swam we played, we had gatherings on Sunday afternoons and after work at night. The communities, the families would get together and just have a good time. We didn’t have television; we finally had radios that we didn’t care that much about them. We would rather play and work. Our people were hard working people, but we made a living. It has been mentioned in some of the radio, television programs that it’s a poor community and that we were ready to leave there, we wanted to move out. And that is farthest from the truth. Hey! We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had everything else it took to be happy. Roane College was established in 1885 with many coming on horseback to get to that college. Then Wheat School was established in 1908. But Roane College was active until 1916. At one of the banquets, the director of Atomic Energy spoke at the last banquet saying, “The might of our country lies in the cooperative effort of rural communities like yours not focused on concentration on population.” Also, an article was in the Journal reporting on the same banquet, saying, “People of Wheat not only speak cooperation, they practice it.” The New York Times also wrote of the beauty and the accomplishments of the Wheat community. The closeness lives on in our community. There is a lot of our families gone, but you can see the ones that struggles to get back to our Homecoming.
[Break in video]
Bonita Irwin: This is what our community was all about. We have 157 stars on here and I am sure that we did miss some, but these boys left to go into the service. When they came home, they had nowhere to go. We lost nine of our wonderful people. And we gave, this is World War II. The ones in gold is the ones that lost their lives. We appreciate you, Mick.
Mick Wiest: Well, we thank you. There was certainly a great deal of sacrifice from the people around here and we have a real debt of gratitude. Who else would like to- thank you, Bonita. (Applause) I know there is many experiences, some good, some bad. We like to hear from all of them. It was an important time.
Don Watson: I’ll say a little bit about Wheat, but I think that Dorothy could be the one that would give the best story on Wheat, because of the book she has written on Wheat if she would get up here, I’d sit down (Laughter). I’ll just give a little bit brief, the Watson family. I’m Don Watson. My great-great-grandfather was John Watson, came over from Ireland in about 1810, and he moved to south of Clinch River near Kingston and later bought a tract of land on the north side of the Clinch River in what is now the Community of Wheat. Through the years this building has been renovated four or five times, I have a few pictures there of it, but in the back of our farm, which I grew up, there were four generations that grew up on this same farm and in the back of the woods there is a cemetery that has John Smith. Now it this isn’t the John Smith from Pocahontas, I don’t think. But there was John Smith that was, I can’t detect the exact date of death, one is 1755, there were only two inscriptions on the graves there. One is Alexander Smith, and that is who my father, or great-grandfather bought the property from. I lived there until I graduated from Wheat High school in 1936. And the Depression was on and my dad was getting a little old, and I was the youngest of nine boys and one girl. All the boys thought they could do better away from home, and I thought I could too. So, I tried to get in the Navy, but I was turned down because of a football injury at that time. And then I went Tennessee Wesleyan College in Athens for a couple years. Incidentally, I ran into one of my friends, right here, which I know from before then, that went to Tennessee Wesleyan. But when I came out of the service then I lived in Harriman and they opened up a building across the street called the Clinton Engineering Works. And there was a fellow in there who is still in Oak Ridge, by the name of Joyce. Is he still here? He’s a lawyer, I think. Well, he was head of the office there in some way and I was in a hardware store across the street and he was always coming over and was very interested in the little trinkets in the hardware. But I remember him very well because he came in and out, but have had no connection since. But in ’42, in ’39, my father died and left my mother and sister and nephew in the Wheat Community. We had sold the large farm and had built a home just across from K-25 on Blair Road. And that home incidentally, is sitting outside of Blair Gate, Elza Gate up on the hill. Somebody told me who owned that and it has sandstone around it now. They moved that home from Wheat up to Oak Ridge. But in ’42, in December, I went into the service and I didn’t come back until ’46, and missed all the excitement here. We knew very little of what happened in Oak Ridge, but I was in Europe and during D-Day, and for quite a while there we had very little opportunity to know what was going on. But anyway, when we came back to Wheat, it was still a community that we all loved each other. And as I understand in ’42, they only went to school until December, and then they had to be pushed out and went to various other schools. I graduated in ’36, and there was a class of nine boys and nine girls. In 1981, we had our 45th anniversary and we had 100% participation. Everyone was back. Since that time, we have lost quite a few. And this year, we’ve lost three already. We had a memorial service a couple, three weeks ago in Dyllis. Part of those three, but anyway, Wheat was always a very close knit, I’m not saying boastfully, we’re not bragging, but we loved each other and we were close together and it was just a fine place to live. But my grandfather, as I say, came here in about 18 and 10, and my father’s name was George Jones, who was named after the George Jones Memorial Baptist Church there. It was his great-uncle. So, I have a lot of ties in the community, but now Dorothy Sellers-Moneymaker has written this book. If you don’t have one, you ought to get it. I’m not advertising for her, but you should get it. Her grandfather rode a mare to deliver mail all over Bethel Valley and back to Wheat. And sometimes at 11 o’clock at night on a cold night you could hear that old horse clattering down the road. It would be Mike Sellers delivering the mail. Why it took him so long, somebody along the way, “Mr. Sellers could you stop at the Grocery store and get me some lemon, Watkins lemon, or this and that?” And he would take it in a special packet and deliver it and talk to them. But he was a fine person. And then her daddy, Smith Sellers, was a rural mail carrier.
Dorothy Moneymaker: And he would take people bread and stuff.
Don Watson: And her mother was an excellent cook. If you don’t believe it, look in the museum over there at that lady that is standing there with the canned fruits and things, that was her mother.
Bonita Irwin: It’s in the book, I have a picture in the hallway.
Don Watson: But anyway you’ll have to say that the Wheat Community, we are boastful, but we are proud of it and there are other good communities too. That’s all about I have to say and thank you! (Applause)
Mick Wiest: Ok let’s-
Lady in Purple: We were rivals of the Wheat basketball team, we had a great rivalry, I lived up in the Robertsville Community up the road a piece, and we had a rivalry with the Wheat basketball team.
Don Watson: I remember playing baseball against County Hill.
Lady: Oh yeah.
Bonita Irwin: We were real rivals, wasn’t we?
Lady: Yeah we really were. And here is a little piece of paper when we were cleaning out my grandfather’s affects that I found. It is the, and many of you may have saved this, it’s the Declaration of Taking. He came home one day and he found this attached to the door. “You are here by commanded to notify James M. Jet, Edgemoor, Tennessee“, that was our address, although we lived in the Robertsville Community, “are his tenant. R.R. Agents here to fore on the nineteenth day of February, 1943, a judgment of the Declaration of Taking, number seventeen, filed in the above entitled proceedings, gave the United States of America possession of track number blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Anderson County in connection with the establishment of the Kingston Demolition Range. On the nineteenth day of February, and to forthwith vacate said premises immediately. You’re further commanded that if none of these parties are found in actual procession of said premises to post a copy of this notice at a conspicuous place upon the premises.” So, that is how he knew, we knew, we heard rumors, but that is how we knew we had to move. Does anyone have one of these?
Don Watson: I have one at home. Mine was mailed to me in Europe. (laughter)
Lady: Well and speaking of cemeteries my great-grandparents, my grandparents, and my parents are all buried in the cemetery behind Willow Brook School in the church, which was the Robertsville Baptist Church.
Don Watson: Since you’re bragging about Robertsville, I remember us playing them in a tournament. We had won 22 games and lost one that year. They had Dorothy Fox, who was an all-tournament, and-
Lady: Hackworth?
Bonita Irwin: I played against Mary Hackworth.
Don Watson: And Lee Price and some of those.
Lady: Well, who won?
Bonita Irwin: We did.
Lady: Shouldn’t have asked.
Don Watson: That’s why I’m boastful.
Lady: I thought you were going to say, “We won all those games, but Robertsville came in and took us.”
Don Watson: They had a good team. Coach Davis.
Lady in Green: I’ve got a little story.
Mick Wiest: Ok.
Lady in Green: She told about moving out. Uncle Jim Freels once got the little picture in that magazine. He was upset and sort of mad and contrary and he would not move out when the time come. (Laughter) He had to go to the police in Oak Ridge and get a permit to move out. That made him mad. They gave him a paper of what he could take with him. Uncle John Jones that lived up at the steam plant did the same thing, but he moved out after dark. He just had to go across the river bridge there. But Uncle Jim had to go and get a permit to move out.
Mick Wiest: Yes I have heard some of the stories about how those who were the last to go.
Lady in Green: He was mad and he went to work as a guard in Oak Ridge and he wouldn’t cash his checks because they were his. So he got a letter one day telling him he had to cash them or they would discard them. He told them that they were his and he would do what he wanted to with them. I think he went and put them in the bank then. That’s a little story of that day and why his picture is in the store.
Mick Wiest: I want Dorothy Moneymaker to say a few words. She wrote the book “We’ll call it Wheat”, and by the way you can get copies of this from Dorothy. There are also copies at the Oak Ridge Library. Here you are Dorothy.
Barbara McCall-Ely: You can’t take them out.
Dorothy Moneymaker: No, they don’t sell.
Barbara McCall-Ely: You just have to look at them.
Dorothy Moneymaker: I wanna tell you about, we didn’t get out in time either. We was suppose to be out by the last day of December in 1942, but you must remember that they didn’t tell you how much you were going to be paid for the land, nor when they were going to give it to you. My husband and I had been married for 8 years and we lived in the, well we’ll say the Wheat community, it’s under restriction now, can’t get in there. So we wasn’t moved out and the guard would come by and sit and watch what you were doing. We had a contract with a place in Knoxville where they bought our eggs. We had a great big chicken farm. We had been married 8 years, but we didn’t have any children, we were expecting our first child. So we were in there. When labor hit me on the 14th, well on the 13th of January in 1943 we went off down to the gate on Blair Road and they wouldn’t let us out to go to the hospital in Harriman because we didn’t have a pass. (Laughter) So my husband had to get in touch with Dr. Hecker in Oliver Springs and he come by and brought his nurse and they let us through. I don’t know what in the world they would have done if they made us stay any longer. (laughter) but we didn’t move out until April in 1943, when we went down to that same gate they unloaded everything you had on the truck and my husband was already working for the fire department in Oak Ridge and they still wouldn’t let us stay. And he came in from work one day and I was taking the screen wire off the windows and doors. And he said, “What in the world you doing that for?” I said, “I’m going to take it with us”. You couldn’t buy it back during the war ‘cause everything was going for something else and so he said, “We’ll never get out with that”. So when we got down there at that gate and was unloading everything. My quilts was in a wooden box with a top on top of it nailed down. And they undone it and was a searching in there and the man turned to the big Ike and said, “There is nothing but quilts and blankets and sheets”. He said, “Well, just put the top back on it”, and he did. And don’t forget that that screen wire was on the bottom of that box. (laughter) Then he, when the City of Oak Ridge took over from the Government they made firemen move back in so we moved back 36 years ago, not to the Wheat Community, we are in Oak Ridge. Yeah. If you want one of my books I’ve got 100 still. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren got to wanting one ‘cause it was about their parents and so forth. And they could find generations, four generations back there. And you can call me at 483-0013 and be sure you say 483, you’ll get McDonalds if you don’t. (laughter)
Don Watson: Let me say one thing about this lady.
Mick Wiest: Ok, and then we’ve got a question right back there.
Don Watson: I want to say one thing. In high school she was one of those petite, nice, young ladies. She came to spend the night with my sister one time. We had, you know, we had parlors back then, and nobody was allowed there except when you had company. We had one of those stand-up phonographs, wind-up you know, and music. She was on our front porch and they had the window open, and she was doing the Charleston. (laughter) My dad came in and said, “Young lady, you are welcome to our house any time you wish, but you will not dance”. So she quit.
Dorothy Moneymaker: I did the Black Bottom too, and I’ll tell you, I never missed a beat.
Mick Wiest: Thank you very much. Now we have a question here.
Lady in white- back row: Dorothy, were you the woman I spoke to several years ago on the phone, you told me about washing your diapers in the stream? Was that you?
Dorothy Moneymaker: Yeah, the water supply in that time after 1943 come and that baby was born you couldn’t hardly get diapers and I used some feed sacks, chicken feed sacks to make diapers and I had to go across the road where there was a stream from a spring and I would wash it out and that guy that come and sat and looked to see what you were doing. One day he come and asked, “What you doing down there?” I said, “I’m a washing baby you-know-what.” And he never did stop again. (laughter)
Barbara McCall-Ely: Tell them about the time the guy told you had to get out. The guy that told you had to get out and you were still pregnant.
Dorothy Moneymaker: Oh yeah. He come up when my husband was at work and he come and knocked on the door and he informed me that “we HAD to get out”. I kind of backed up from the door so he could see- the young’un was 8 pounds and four ounces so you know I wasn’t little. I said, “Sir, didn’t you know that there was a law in the state of Tennessee that says that you cannot evict a pregnant woman?” “No, I didn’t know that” and he never came back. And in my book, I want you to know right now that anything dirty I knew; I didn’t put it in there. (laughter)
Don Watson: I’ll vouch for that.
Mick Wiest: Anybody else? Ok.
Barbara McCall-Ely: I was one of the younger ones.
Mick Wiest: Ok. We are going to wrap this up here in a few minutes. We have the photo albums to look at, we’ve got a couple posters, and we’ve got the evaluation forms which I will hand out in just a couple of minutes. Last chance to for anyone to offer any experience or any stories.
Bonita Irwin: I understand that the last few days we’ve not done as much research on this as we would have like to. These ladies here are my first cousins. Our mothers lived in this house. My grandfather, our great-grandfather gave all the land for down at Bethel for the church and the cemetery. His name was Samuel Taylor.
Dorothy Moneymaker: Tell them about the Wheat Community being centered on religion and education. You know that.
Bonita Irwin: Yeah, I know it, but you can tell it better. (laughter)
Dorothy Moneymaker: The Community was based on religion and education. George Jones Minister, where that church house is, anyway, he didn’t have anyone to leave his property to and he left 259 acres or something, anyway, anybody that wanted to build a church could do it free of charge, no taxes, and as for education there were 22 houses on the property and anybody that had somebody connected to the education system or religion could live in those free of charge. The water was furnished too, but they had to go somewhere to carry it in. I could kind of show you if I was down there. Where it went from where to where. Have you ever paid any attention to the marker where the overpass for the Lenoir City is, down toward K-25? Well it started along down in there and went up to Blair Road and then it went from the top of one ridge to the top of another one. I could talk some more, but I won’t. I’ll hush.
Bonita Irwin: There were three denominations.
Dorothy Moneymaker: Yeah, there were three denominations, Baptist, Common Presbyterian, and Methodist. And we had what you call “circuit riding preachers”. On the first Sunday of the month, we went to the Baptist Church. We had Sunday school. My daddy was Sunday school superintendent for years; her daddy was a deacon, or maybe he was an elder, I don’t know. Anyway, we would go there the first Sunday and have Sunday and the preacher would preach, and then on the second Sunday we would go to the Common Presbyterian, well now the third Sunday we went to the Common Presbyterian Church. Anyway, we went from one church to the other every week and everyone would come. One Sunday was a Baptist preacher, one was a Common Presbyterian preacher, and the next was a Baptist preacher and all of us young’uns would be so ticked on the Sundays when we didn’t have a preacher (laughter) because we all got out and played together.
[Break in video]
Barbara McCall-Ely: I was one of the younger ones that left. I was 11 years old when they told us we had to leave home. My brother was 13. My brother didn’t like those men that came in and knocked on the walls. He said, “What you knocking on the house walls for?” “We need to. We need to see about this house, how sound it is.” Well, you know, he didn’t think it was necessary. Well, as they were walking out the door, my brother kicked one of them on the shin. The man turned around and said, “Why boy what are you doing?” He said, “This is my house and you’re not welcome here. Good-bye.” Well, when we started to leave home, all of our farms had a name. And ours was “Edgewood”. We forgot to take our sign down off from over front porch. We thought we had everything, but we didn’t. And it was in their pictures, the government’s pictures. And my brother said, “Granddaddy, I sure want to take our sign.” So granddaddy lifted him up and he was going to get our sign. The government of course was watching, and they said, “No, you won’t. That’s ours.” Gene said, “But it’s the name of our home.” But anyway, we didn’t get our sign. My brother and I as they slammed the gate on us, down at Blair Road. I hate them, we never got to go back home. It’s still restricted. I never laid eyes on it. But I understand that all they did with our homes was bulldoze them off the hills. They never used them. Why they wanted to go in our homes and invade it, I don’t know. But they just bulldozed them off of the hills. So all the stuff that they said we couldn’t have just went in the ground. And that’s fine. I understand that perhaps I will be able to look at Wheat, (break in video) my home from a distance someday. One man told me that they would take me over as close as they could get to my home. Just to look at it. I’m 66 now, I left at 11. I’m one of them that I went to school at Wheat until December in 1942; I went to Dyllis from December to April of ’93.
Voice off Camera: ’43.
Barbara McCall-Ely: Ok. ’43. Well we moved to Cartive, which is Rockwood area. We went from Dyllis to Cartive which was, the building was just one building and every class was in there. And my brother and I didn’t really care for that. But anyway, we went there for the rest of ’43. Then Grandmother and Granddaddy then got us in Rockwood in the later part of ’43. They say that teenagers have a lot of trouble nowadays. We had a lot of trouble, and we were very bitter at the government and everything else. Granddaddy said, “This would be something that would bring our boys back, the war is going to be over, and everyone would be coming back”. Sydney Arnold died, K.B. Johnson died. I mean, there were just so many things that when we kept saying, “When is it all going to be over?” We didn’t get up and shoot anybody, and we didn’t get up and knife anybody. We could have those government men, I think (laughter), but we didn’t do it. I remember Mr. Jess Jones. Now I know his girls and they had a picture of them in the paper, and it said his pretty daughters, Della and Lucille. And I’m still good friends with Lucille. She was a classmate of mine. Mr. Jess Jones said, “I’m not leaving”. Well, Mr. Jess did but it wasn’t the way he wanted to. But there were many of them and I can remember growing up in a community where, my mother and father were divorced and all the Wheat High School kids, everybody just if we wanted to go somewhere to a ball game or something, we just managed to get there because we were little guys, and everybody sort of looked after us. Everybody knew Barbara and Gene McCall. Because they just, we were just part of the community, so they took good care of us. We had grandparents as I have said many times, my grandmother said, “Don’t you ever talk about anybody around here because you are kin to them”. We were from the Smiths, the McKinneys, the Roberts and the Stubbs. Really everyone was kin to us somehow. That was one thing I learned real early in life, don’t talk about people cause they’re your kin folks. I love the people that are still living. We are burying quite a few of them that I knew at an early age. Marvin Stonecipher, we lost him last year. So many of them, Lee Alan Arnold, Gene Arnold. We lost so many of them suddenly and some of those, two of them, Gene and Lee Alan was in Don Watson’s class. We were just like a big family. I didn’t know I didn’t belong to everybody and it was a loving community.
Mick Wiest: Thank you very much, Barbara. (applause) Ok, if there’s no one else that wants to add anything, we are going to go ahead and close this and give everybody an opportunity to look at what we have on the table.
Lady in Green: I was raised up here at Scarboro
Mick Wiest: Yes.
Lady in Green: I can talk without that. [referring to microphone]
Mick Wiest: Well they need to hear you a little bit.
Lady in Green: In other words a big house. At one time Scarboro had a telephone office that we could call to Knoxville or Clinton or wherever. And then we had I know of three doctors. Dr. Lee and Dr. Simons. What was the other one, Nadine? And they all weren’t there at one time. We had two grist mills, a lumber mill, a (inaudible) and three grocery stores and for this and a little post office at my house where my daddy carried the mail out of Edgemoor. The route number 1 man would bring him the mail and he would route it there. Go through Robertsville and down to Pine Ridge and then back up the valley and I guess he would meet the Wheat postmaster somewhere. And then we had 3 ponds and these ponds were for the grist mills. Whenever the people would bring corn or wheat, I don’t think they ground wheat; they take that to Lenoir City. We had 2 churches, Common Presbyterian Church and when we were talking about the Common Presbyterian in Wheat, I use to go down to camp, church camp down at Wheat High School when they would have a camp there. But we had a close knit community and as I said a lot of the teachers and a lot of the doctors and everything was there. We didn’t have much money, but we weren’t poor. And we had plenty. We didn’t have any electricity at that time. We had to carry water from the spring, but I was lucky. We had a well on our back porch. And It was sad because the people that were notified to move out, word had got out to the other counties and they raised the prices of houses and a lot of the people from around here, around Scarboro didn’t have bank accounts. They couldn’t borrow money to buy a house with. A lot of the families moved in two or three families in one house until they could find something. It was sad. But people were humble and went ahead. I know we moved in ’35. They consolidated the two mail routes. My daddy, we moved to Harriman then. He carried the mail out of Harriman. We were a happy family. Nadine lived out over this way. And to come down to the Freels Bend, you either come by buggy, you had to come through a big creek up here where the creek comes through. Grandpa Freels went to the bend, and if he was on Old Ben we knew we couldn’t go with him. If he was in the buggy we could bum a ride and go down to Nadine’s. It is a lot of material, of feelings and things like that. And people worked together and shared together. Not like it is now. And poor old people that went out, most of the land was inherited and they moved north, east, south and west. Where ever they could find something. And a lot of the people hadn’t even been out of the county, didn’t know which way to go. Didn’t have transportation to go.
Dorothy Moneymaker: And we had gotten, our area had gotten a lot of the people when they took the Smoky Mountains. We got a lot of people. And when they started Norris Dam, we got a lot of people. God rest them, they hardly got their things put down, when they had to move again.
Lady in Green: John Rice Irwin was one of them.
Nadine___ : Well everybody, (inaudible) Freels Cabin. But I was the only Freels family that actually lived in Freels Bend. If you go right across the ridge over on the other side, it’s on the Clinch River. It’s where we lived when they took the area over and we were the only Freels family that had lived in the bend for I guess 25-30 years. So I’m one of the last ones that lived in Freels Bend. And the only way we could get out was with a horse or buggy until I was in about the fourth grade. And when I was in the fourth grade they got this road that goes down through here, goes around the bend. They got a school bus around. I went to Scarboro School. My mother was a school teacher so she taught my brother and I. When we started school, I was in the third grade and he was in the second grade.
Mick Wiest: I think I heard that John Freels also was one of the last to go.
Nadine___ : No, now John Freels lived on the other side of the river, he didn’t in this side of Freels Bend.
Mick Wiest: There was a Freels, a man who didn’t want to leave. [inaudible]
Lady in Green: Jim Freels.
Mick Wiest: He didn’t leave until there was a threat of arrest if he didn’t go.
Nadine___ : Well we had to come over here to get our mail. The mail came down this far. I can remember as a small child walking across the ridge to get our mail.
Mick Wiest: Well that’s great. (applause) I want to give everybody a big thank you.
[End of Video]